Johnson: O.C. war hero Brett Doggett sees the end near

You look at him and think of what used to be, going back even to that innocent moment when he jumped down from his light armored vehicle to that last second before everything exploded beneath him and led to this.

Life is like that. At one moment you are a strapping, seemingly invincible gung-ho Marine. The next you are a broken, half-dead shell of man, completely blind and seated in a wheelchair in the driveway of your crumbling home, trying desperately to hide the stump where your left foot used to be because blood and other gore refuses to stop oozing from the pile of bandages you have heaped on it.

Ah, but you have made fools of the doctors and their predictions, particularly the one where they said you would never live past your 48th birthday on Jan. 16.

All you want to do now is make it to March 3, the anniversary of the day that landmine -- buried in the sand in the foul, putrid-smelling wreckage of war-torn Kuwait -- claimed your foot. Yes, you tell yourself, maybe that day would be most fitting.

Marine Sgt. Brett Doggett, then of Mission Viejo, was hailed in 1991 as a hero across this country, and particularly in Orange County, at the end of the Persian Gulf War. Four days after President George H.W. Bush declared victory in the confrontation with Iraq, Doggett stepped on a landmine while on foot patrol in search of snipers, the blast decimating his left foot and badly mangling his right.

He was a hot celebrity then, lying in his hospital bed. Television, radio and newspaper reporters flooded in to see him. A general pinned a Purple Heart to his bedclothes. Even Gen. Colin Powell and his wife stopped by.

Just as quick as the blast itself, the limelight dimmed. Doggett would spend the next 19 years in a heated and, sometimes, embarrassing fight with the government seeking recognition that his injuries we serious enough to warrant full financial compensation.

His wife, Susan, walks out of the front door to their modest Orange home carrying a thick, paper-laden three-ring binder on which rests another thick pile of papers.

"Two years worth of his medical files," she says, pointing at her husband.

The past 3½ years, to put it mildly, have not been kind to the Marine. There isn't nearly room here to list all of his ailments, but it starts with the retinal hemorrhages that blinded him in 2009. He suffers from severe anemia and diabetes. His kidneys have all but shut down. And then there were the two heart attacks that nearly killed him.

"The doctors gave him five days to live last month if he didn't check himself into the hospital, have feeding tubes inserted, exploratory surgery done," Susan Doggett said.

"OK, I told them," Brett Doggett continues, "I won't. I've been through all of that. No one gets to live to 120. "

All that he wants now, he says, is to die at home with his wife and with his dignity.

He is not at all worried about himself, Brett Doggett said. His only concern now is for his wife.

Susan, 59, who he met and, later, married after she read about him in the newspaper during his hero days, is affectionately known in Orange County as The Bird Lady.

She is a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator, a woman who has nursed back to life more than 34,000 hawks, owls, crows, ravens and just about anything else that flies. She left medical school in 1978 to volunteer with the Department of Fish and Game, and has since followed her passion to care for wildlife – a passion for which she is not paid.

We are sitting in the driveway because inside the house is one raven, one crow, three red-tailed hawks, three great-horned owls and an assortment of various owl species. The government and others drop the wounded birds at the house at all hours, knowing Susan Doggett will tend to them.

"I just love animals, and it's my way of putting something back into society," she says softly. "A way of paying it forward, I guess."

When he is gone, Brett Doggett said, so will everything about him, including the government disability payments that have supported them for the past 22 years. Susan, he said, will likely lose the house; the military life insurance policy not begin to cover the $450,000 they owe. She will have nothing left.

"I need help," he says when Susan goes back into the house briefly, "or at least get people to understand it's not easy for veterans. Their widows get overlooked. They are just afterthoughts."

Sitting outside in the sun with the blind Marine, I ask him if he ever regrets any of it – the signing up with the Marines, the loss of a foot, the battle just to be fairly compensated.

"No," he says immediately and firmly.

"When I was a kid, I liked old black-and-white military movies. At 7, my favorite shirt was a military shirt. I was always destined for military service.

"I had all of the toy soldiers and vehicles. In middle school, in art class, I would draw tanks and submarines. I always loved the military. If I could go back, I would do nothing different."